"Defect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the churches in England are serious, upright men, who would gladly lead if they could. Nor is it because they are voices uttering strange announcements in the wilderness; if they have a fault it is rather that they have so little to announce. The defect which is disclosed by the pictures given by "A Gentleman with a Duster" is primarily intellectual, and I propose to devote to its explanation the introduction which the publisher has asked me to write for the American ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... he become involved, and what was the final outcome? What defect in his character is it charged that his business relations brought to light (pp. ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Beaufort. Eb'ry step was worth a half-a-dollar." And they all marched as if it were so. They knew well that they were marching through throngs of officers and soldiers who had drilled as many months as we had drilled weeks, and whose eyes would readily spy out every defect. And I must say, that, on the whole, with a few trivial exceptions, those spectators behaved in a manly and courteous manner, and I do not care to write down all the handsome things that were said. Whether said or not, they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... twenty thousand pounds had been held out. But it had been held out only to the ships belonging to any of his majesty's subjects, exclusive of his majesty's own ships. The act had a still more capital defect. It held out this reward only to such ships as should discover a passage through Hudson's Bay; and, as we shall soon take occasion to explain, it was, by this time, pretty certain that no such passage existed within those limits. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... c'etait vrai. We still find ester, to stand ("Et ne pooit ester sur ses pieds," "He could not stand on his legs"). At present the French have no single word for "standing," which has often been pointed out as a real defect of the language. "To stand" is ester, in ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... played, she thought, more by the touch than the eye, often feeling the head of a piece to satisfy himself whether it had the king's crown or the queen's round head, the bishop's mitre or the knight's ears, but he was so quick and ready that it was impossible to tell how far the defect of sight went, and she could not bear to ask or ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Zedekiah we will furnish you. This genealogy has been got up by the faithful and very persevering labours of Rev. F. R. A. Glover, M.A., and Rev. A. B. Grimaldi, M.A., two Episcopalian clergymen of England. The chart is supposed to be as near perfect as any such thing can be. If any of you find any defect be kind enough and let me know. In the following genealogy those who reigned have K. prefixed—the dates after private names refer to their birth and death, those after Sovereign's names to their accession ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... and worse defect in a philosophy than that of contradicting our active propensities is to give them no object whatever to press against. A philosophy whose principle is so incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all {83} relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... unjust and unreasonable as at first it may seem; for if a man has parts, he must know of what infinite consequence it is to him to have a graceful manner of speaking, and a genteel and pleasing address; he will cultivate and improve them to the utmost. Your figure is a good one; you have no natural defect in the organs of speech; your address may be engaging, and your manner of speaking graceful, if you will; so that if you are not so, neither I nor the world can ascribe it to anything but your want of parts. What is the constant and just observation ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... manner of appearing to fly in the air: Three hunchbacked dwarfs of extraordinary deformity: Some male and female Indians whose skins were remarkable for an extraordinary whiteness, and who had a natural defect of vision[4]. Cortes was likewise attended by several young chiefs of the Mexican and Tlascalan nations, who went over along with him into Spain ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... are so small, that, after great rains they are sometimes bouchees, or stopped up; that is, they do not admit a sufficient passage for the encreased body of the water. In order to remedy this dangerous defect, in some measure, they found an artist some years ago, who has removed a middle pier, and thrown two arches into one. This alteration they looked upon as a masterpiece in architecture, though there is many a common mason in England, who would have undertaken and performed the work, without ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... min. Of the joints uncovered 57% was found to be leaking. It is rather remarkable that, in the large leakage of the 11-and 12-in. pipe between Coyote and Bonito, only one out of every eight joints was leaking. This indicates a physical defect in such joints. The largest leak found on one joint was at the rate of 17[,?]280 gal. per day. Leakage between or through the staves is not measurable, as it is not fast enough to come away in drops unless there is some ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell
... the motor-bus have come out of a past and are moving towards a future. But how often does our imagination put itself to the trouble of realising this? We may observe with some care, yet owing to a fundamental defect of attitude we are observing not the human individuals, but a peculiar race of beings who pass their whole lives in motor-buses, who exist only in motor-buses and only in the present! No human phenomenon is adequately seen until ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... our plants. Any two-year-old plant in our field that doesn't bloom, we dig it up and throw it away, and that will nip any trouble in the bud, and then you will not get any strain that is not blooming. If we see any other defect, any that won't head good, we take it up and throw it away. That one point I think all of you can well follow, and that is, to dig up every two-year-old plant that doesn't bloom and throw it away, that ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... The only defect in this variety is, that the pods are often not well filled. When growing, it is scarcely distinguishable from Harrison's Glory; but, in the mature state, the seeds of the former are smooth and white, while those of the latter are ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... "For the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considered with his devotion to his art." His art never taught him prejudice or to wear only one eye. "His art is less for every deduction from his holiness and less for every defect of common sense." And this common sense has a great deal to do with this distinguishing difference of Emerson's between genius and talent, repose and truth, and between all evidences of substance and manner in art. Manner breeds partialists. "Is America ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... softest pillow and the tenderest nursing will be his. A love will be bestowed upon him which gold could not buy, and which no beauty of person, and no brilliancy of natural gifts could possibly awaken. It is thus with every case of defect or eccentricity of person. So sure as the mother of a child sees in that child's person any reason for the world to regard it with contempt or aversion, does she treat it with peculiar tenderness; as if she were commissioned ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... Cyclopaedia" of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and retains some of the best features of that excellent work. Its arrangement seems to us peculiarly inconvenient; but its most glaring defect is the lack of American subjects, and the slipshod, unsatisfactory, and inaccurate manner in which the few that are found in it have been treated. The "Encyclopaedia Britannica" is open to the same objection. The first edition ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... falling into any vicious extreme of that nature. It is thus in countries where men's bodies are apt to exceed in corpulency, personal beauty is placed in a much greater degree of slenderness, than in countries where that is the most usual defect. Being so often struck with instances of one species of deformity, men think they can never keep at too great a distance from it, and wish always to have a leaning to the opposite side. In like manner, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... fifth, Modesty scourges Lust; in the sixth, Generosity pours coin into the throat of Avarice. To quote the words of the author from whom these interpretations are derived: "These sculptures are of the very highest class of art, and infinitely superior to any work in the chapter house; the only defect is the size of the heads: probably this was intentional on the part of the artist. The intense life and movement of the figures are worthy of special study." These allegories are common in paintings and sculptures of this period; at Canterbury the same subjects are incised on the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... council have reported to the King that the accusation was false and malicious.(370) This is an exact abridgement of the story; the commentary would be too voluminous. The heats upon it are great: the violent Whigs are not at all convinced of the Whiggism of the culprits, by the defect of evidence: the opposite clan affect as much conviction as if they wished ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... pointing out myself what many readers will consider the principal defect of the work. This book is written to favor no particular views, and in composing it I have entertained no design of serving or attacking any party: I have undertaken not to see differently, but to look farther than parties, and while they are busied ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... better, as a painting, to-day than it did when it was fresh from his easel. Rubens could not have laid on the colors with more solidity and with truer feeling for the hues of life. But the trouble with Thompson was that he had never learned how to draw correctly; and this defect appeared to some extent in his portraits as well as in his figures. The latter were graceful, significant, full of feeling and character; but they betrayed a weakness of anatomical knowledge and of perspective. They had not ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... the appreciation and enjoyment of the picture. It has what I conceive to be that most rare merit,—it has the same universal hue of nature and truth in both the shadows and the lights which Nature has, but Art almost never, and which is the great cross to the artist. The great defect and the great difficulty, in imitating the hues of flesh, lies in the shadows and the half-shadows. You will often observe in otherwise excellent works of the most admirable masters, that, the moment their pencil passes to the shadows of the flesh, especially ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... before the dread tribunal, he was simply informed that he lay under strong suspicions of heresy. No accuser was named; but the thumb-screw, the stretching-rope, the boot and wedge, or other enginery of torture, soon supplied that defect, and, innocent or ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... the officers of the United States in various instances, and in none more than in respect to the most important stations, appear to call for legislative revision. The consequences of a defective provision are of serious import to the Government. If private wealth is to supply the defect of public retribution, it will greatly contract the sphere within which the selection of character for office is to be made, and will proportionally diminish the probability of a choice of men able as well as upright. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of George Washington • George Washington
... first with a pencil in the fingers of an artist who understood. And there were her lashes, dark and long, and curled up at the ends; and her cheek, with its changing, come-and-go coloring; her mouth, with its upper lip creased deeply in the middle—so deeply that a bit more would have been a defect—and with an odd little dimple at one corner; luckily, it was on the side toward him, so that he might look at it all he wanted to for once; for it was always there, only growing deeper and wickeder when she spoke or laughed. He could ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... country, or in the abolition of slavery. Punishment is, in all very early stages of society, capricious, mostly unregulated by any definite customs or enactments, and, consequently, often disproportioned, either in the way of excess or defect, to the character of the offence. As the community advances in complexity and intelligence, successive reformers arise who attempt, by definite enactment, to regulate the amount of punishment due to each description of offence, and, from time to time, to increase or diminish, as occasion ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... the first to become the purchaser of a fine dish of fish for his master, at a very low price, too, which much astonished him. He smelt at them, and examined their gills, and turned them over most critically; for he could not help fancying that there must be some defect. ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... [113] This much-criticised defect has been only partially overcome in our methods of education through "object" lessons, and, if we may call them so, evolutionary methods, showing to the child "wie es eigentlich gewesen." Cf. J. Dewey, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... rebuild the nave entirely, but had to incorporate the Norman end by Remigius. Unfortunately the axis of the west front does not correspond to that of the nave, which is too wide for its height. The low vaulting is a serious defect in the choir built by St. Hugh, but of the superb beauty of the Angel Choir, which encloses his shrine, there can be no doubt. In its richness of sculpture it is one of the masterpieces of Gothic architecture in England. The interior of the cathedral is remarkable for the harmony ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... compactness in her form, that she was often called the little fairy. She had the misfortune to be lame in one of her hips; but by good management, and a briskness and alacrity in carrying herself, it was a very small blemish to her, and looked more like an idle childish gait, than any real defect. ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... flippancy; and flippancy is also the third. With the dull it will pass for wit, with some it will pass for scorn, and even the witty will not be enabled to point out the difference, without running the risk of being considered invidious. It will cover every defect with a defect still greater; for who can call small beer tasteless when it is sour, or dull when it is bottled and has ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... to anger. It has rather caused me to devote such hours as I could spare from the preparation of my series of sermons on the miracle of Jonah to personal introspection, in the endeavour to discover, if possible, whether the cause of our estrangement lay in any defect ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... that I quite forgot, in narrating my Princeton experiences, to tell of something very much like this incident. It was in my last year, and my landlady had just moved into a new house, when, owing to some defect in the building, it caught fire, but was luckily saved after it had received some damage. I awoke in the night, flames bursting into my room, and much smoke. It happened that the day before a friend ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... low inns resorted to by seamen, no accommodation of the kind. There is barely room for Jack to foot it in a reel, the tap-room is so small; and as Jack is soon reeling after he is once on shore, it is a very great defect. Now, the Lust Haus is a room as large as an assembly-room in a country town, well lighted up with lamps and chandeliers, well warmed with stoves, where you have room to dance fifty reels at once, and still have plenty of accommodation at the chairs and tables ranged round on each ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... romance of antiquity is a mere "sport," an accident of time and circumstance, the chanson de geste, majestic and interesting as it is, representative as it is to a certain extent of a nation and a language, has the capital defect of not being adaptable. Having little or no allegorical capacity, little "soul," so to speak, it was left by the tide of time on the shores thereof without much hope of floating and living again. The Arthurian Legend, if ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... be wrong to think that I have a defect which would lower me in my own eyes. Be sure, sir, that I shall only be curious ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... if some of them were finally persuaded that Honesty is the best Policy—a maxim that few Italians believe. And here lies the trouble,—in the unfathomable, disheartening duplicity of the race. The children are not quarrelsome, nor cruel, nor brutal; but the servile defect of falsehood fixed by long generations of slavery in the Italians, is almost ineradicable. The fault is worse in Naples than elsewhere in Italy; but how bad it is everywhere, not merely travellers, but all residents in Italy, must ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... ever framed was without defect; no act of human wisdom was ever {90} free from imperfection.... To assert then that our scheme is without fault, would be folly. It was necessarily the work of concession; not one of the thirty-three framers but had on some points to yield his opinions; and, for myself, I ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... should forthwith and therewithal pass into the possession of the Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, nephew and presumptive heir of the aforesaid Johann Orth, to the estimated value of L150,000 sterling, in excess or defect thereof as the case might be, it being thereafter presumed that the aforesaid Johann Orth, together with the aforesaid Milli Orth, his reputed accomplice in matrimony, did meet or encounter their death upon the high seas by the act or ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoyded by the learned Ancients both in Poetry and all good Oratory This neglect then of Rime so little is to be taken for a defect though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... interesting, and silly when they try to be playful. If they would only leave off attitudinizing, one would be appeased. It may not be possible to acquire agreeable manners, any more than a pleasant voice; but it is possible to be quiet. But no suspicion of defect seems ever to have penetrated the bosoms of such girls. They act as if they thought attention was admiration. Levity they mistake for vivacity. Peevishness is elegance. Boldness is dignity. Rudeness is savoir faire Boisterousness ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... concrete will allow dampness to permeate, whether it comes from water-bearing soil or a driving rain. One objection to concrete-block houses has been that a hard rain would cause moisture to form on the inside. Brick buildings have the same defect when the ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... juries and judges that existing laws and institutions are unjust to women, or to the fact that juries composed wholly of men are led to do injustice by their susceptibility to the attractions of women. But certainly it is a grave defect in any system of government that it does not administer justice impartially, and the existence of such a defect is a strong reason for preferring an arrangement which would remove the feeling that women do not have fair play, or ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... statesman, however, is in many cases an advantage rather than a defect, and Falieri was young in vigor and character, and still full of life and strength. He was married a second time to presumably a beautiful wife much younger than himself, though the chroniclers are not agreed even on the subject ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... give, the Estates supplied the defect by loyal professions and barbarous statutes. The King, in a letter which was read to them at the opening of their session, called on them in vehement language to provide new penal laws against the refractory Presbyterians, and expressed his regret that business ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... orchestra, and for orchestra with solo voices and chorus—and won distinction to a greater or less degree in every field save that of the opera. Notwithstanding the beauty of poetic inspiration enshrined in the four symphonies, a grave defect is the quality of orchestral tone which greets the ear, especially the modern ear accustomed to the many-hued sonority of Wagner, Tchaikowsky, Debussy and others. These symphonies have been called "huge pieces for four hands" which ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... Erard's action, completed in 1821, the germ of which will be found in the later Cristofori, are not, however, due to repetition capability, but to other causes, chiefly, I will say, to counterpoise. The radical defect of repetition is that the repeated note can never have the tone-value of the first; it depends upon the mechanical contrivance, rather than the finder of the player, which is directly indispensable to the production of satisfactory tone. When the sensibility of the player's touch ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... the old knight as one looks upon an inferior person. He was neither a very bad man, nor a very cruel one, but he had the defect common to all Knights of the Cross, who in spite of their being well-bred and even humane, looked with contempt upon those whom they conquered, neither could they suppress their great pride when ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... find the Roman Catholic Pro-Cathedral, almost hidden behind houses. It is of dark-red brick, and was designed by Mr. Goldie, but the effect of the north porch is lost, owing to the buildings which hem it in; this defect will doubtless be remedied in time as leases expire. The interior of the cathedral is of great height, and the light stone arches are supported by pillars of ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... God thus ordained, that we may learn to bear one another's burdens, because none is without defect, none without a burden, none sufficient of himself, none wise enough of himself; but it behoveth us to bear with one another, to comfort one another, to help, instruct, admonish one another. How much strength ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... to be accounted of."[284] Chapman says in his preface to Achilles' Shield: "Some will convey their imperfections under his Greek shield, and from thence bestow bitter arrows against the traduction, affirming their want of admiration grows from the defect of our language, not able to express the copiousness (coppie) and elegancy of the original." Richard Greenway, who translated the Annals of Tacitus, admits cautiously that his medium is "perchance not so fit to set out a piece drawn with so curious a pencil."[285] One cannot, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... ' First then let me speak of Hariot's method, of which frequent mention will have to be made in the following pages; so that the reader may understand why some things are stated and some passed over: here I cannot but complain, that I find it a serious defect that his Commentators have so completely transformed it [the Praxis] that they not only do not retain his orderbut not evenhis language.' Again he writes, ' But not even those well-thought-out and necessary to be known matters, which have been delivered ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... Another striking defect in the Phoenician, or at any rate in the Cyprio-Phoenician, sculpture, and one that cannot be excused on account of any inherent weakness in the material, is the thinness and flatness of the greater part of the figures. The sculptor seems to have been ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... have a slate roof which leaks very much. I have not discovered any defect in the way in which it was put on; it appears to be perfect. The pitch may be too low, and the rain may be driven through by the wind on this account. Is there any wash, paint, or cement that might be used ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... of colour and variegated architecture," would suit the most fastidious home-seeker. In his prospectus to the public he informed that the view from the windows was unrivalled, as it commanded the whole island and its surroundings. But either "The House of Mansions" had some defect, or the situation was still too remote from the city. The project was not a success, and in 1860 the Rutgers Female College, incidentally the first institution for the higher education of young women in the city, moved from its downtown home ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... old bank director with his poem! He had mistaken the throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart. What he called "a wonderful piece of mechanism" was an imperfect device to remedy an unnecessary defect, the clumsy ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... a defect, of all photoplays that human beings tend to become dolls and mechanisms, and dolls and mechanisms tend to become human. But the haughty, who scorn the moving pictures, cannot rid themselves of the feeling that they are being seduced into going into some sort of a Punch-and-Judy ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... antagonists. It necessitated an implacable resistance, but also it commanded respect. Against it fought three great peoples with as fine a will; but they had neither the unity, the habitual discipline, nor the science of Germany, and it was the latter defect that became more and more the distressful matter of Mr. Britling's thoughts. France after her initial experiences, after her first reeling month, had risen from the very verge of defeat to a steely splendour of resolution, but ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... live entirely in the present, and their genius concentrates on one point. The hours of their existence are not connected by a chain of grave and disinterested meditations. They succeed themselves in a series of acts. They lack interior life. This defect is particularly visible in Napoleon, who never lived within himself. From this is derived the frivolity of temperament which made him support easily the enormous load of his evils and of his faults. His mind was born anew every day. He had, more than any other person, a capacity ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... which the Bush is rather inconspicuous. But Claude might well reply, that what he intended was not a history, nor a homily, but a picture; that the name was added for convenience' sake, as he might name his son, John, without meaning any comparisons with the Evangelist. It is no defect, but a merit, that it requires nothing else than itself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... great Earl of Leicester invested his memory with a lustre which has not been dimmed by the lapse of centuries. The paltering of the king called forth the patriotism of the people. "So may a glory from defect arise." The sevenfold lustre of the rainbow is only seen when there is rain as well ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... one deep defect in our extension of cosmopolitan and Imperial cultures. That is, that in most human things if you spread your butter far you spread it thin. But there is an odder fact yet: rooted in something dark and irrational in human nature. That is, that when you find your butter thin, you ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... may be classed with fictions intended to convey certain views of life; but its chief defect is, that the object of the writer remains in a mist, even at the end of the story. The "Elective Affinities," while it contains many beauties as a work of art, is objectionable in a ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... it occurred to Herapath that if they turned it upside down this defect would operate in the other direction, and hold the books securely against the wall. So, having wrenched the nails out, and been fortunate enough to find a space on the wall not gaping with wounds in the plaster, they re-erected it inversely. But, alas! although ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... enhanced the likeness very much, last Friday morning, by singing a barcarole on the rocks. I was a trifle too flesh-coloured (the stage knowing no medium between bright salmon and dirty yellow), but apart from that defect, not badly made up by any means. When you write to me, my dear Stanny, as I hope you will soon, address Poste Restante, Genoa. I remain out here until the end of September, and send in for my letters daily. There is a postman for this place, but he gets drunk and loses the letters; ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... southern California ranges. Then this neck of the woods seemed calling me, and I trailed over to look after a bit of land in Yuma. I wasted some time trying to break into the army, but they found some eye defect that I don't know anything about—and don't more than half believe! I had some dandy prospecting plans after that, but there was no jingling in my pockets—no outfit money, so I hailed Singleton as an angel monoplaned down with the ducats. Yes sir, ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... pretty gothic paper, in green, but over each window was a chasm in the upper border; and as this border supplied the arches, the unity of the entire design was broken in no less than four places, that being the precise number of the windows. The defect soon attracted the eye of Eve, and she was not ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... which most frequently causes this serious defect is rheumatism, or rheumatic fever; but it may also occur after pneumonia, typhoid, blood poisoning, or even after a common cold, or an attack of the grip. This is one of several reasons why we should endeavor, in every way, to avoid and stop the spread ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... depends in a great measure on finding some soft substance like leather, which will take as much ink as it ought from the block, and which will give it up most completely to paper. Impressions thus obtained are usually fainter on the lower side; and in order in some measure to remedy this defect, rather more ink is put on the block at the first than at ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... tongues no rhet'rick we expect Nor yet a sweet Consort from broken strings, Nor perfect beauty, where's a main defect; My foolish, broken, blemish'd Muse so sings And this to mend, alas, no Art is able, 'Cause ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... again there are workmen and inspectors testing and gauging another similar giant. Look down this shining tube and watch the gauging, now with callipers, now with a rubber device which takes the impression of the rifling and reveals any defect. The gauging turns upon the ten-thousandth part of an inch, and any mistake or flaw may mean the lives ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... perceived that if any constitutional defect attached to the legislative acts of the assembly it is not pretended to consist in irregularity of election or want of qualification of the members, but only in the change of its place of session. However trivial this objection may seem to be, it requires to be considered, because ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... Gabriel, young Chapman found the padres having trouble to keep the flour which they ground in their new stone mill from being dampened by water from the mill wheel. Knowing something of machinery, the American remedied the defect by means of a flutter wheel, and ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... shall caution my well-bred reader against a common fault, much of the same nature; which is, mentioning any particular quality as absolutely essential to either man or woman, and exploding all those who want it. This renders every one uneasy who is in the least self-conscious of the defect. I have heard a boor of fashion declare in the presence of women remarkably plain, that beauty was the chief perfection of that sex, and an essential without which no woman was worth regarding; a certain method of putting all those in the room, who are but suspicious ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... monk's cowl and spy upon the secrets of his queen's dying confession. That, however, may have been pardoned by an Elizabethan audience; any trick may have been thought good enough which exposed Spanish villany. A more serious defect is the undue prominence given to Llewellyn and to Queen Elinor. This is not accidental, for the full title of the play states that it is to include 'also the life of Llevellen rebell in Wales; lastly, the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... in the most fundamental of all social operations, the building up of the family, the issues involved in the nuptial contract, lie beyond the best exercise of human thought, and the unseen forces of providential government make good the defect in our imperfect capacity. Even so would it seem to have been in that curious marriage of competing influences and powers, which brings about the composite harmony of the British Constitution. More, it must be admitted, than any other, it leaves open doors which lead into blind alleys; for it presumes, ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... future with more or less exactitude just as the mind can recall the past. For past and future are but different forms of our own subjective intuition of time, and because this internal intuition represents no figure, we seek to supply the defect by an analogy. For time exists within us, not without us; it is not something which subsists of itself, but it is the form ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... exhausted all the hypothetical possibilities of the case, and, from having started with the idea that Bourgonef was the assassin, I came at last to the more sensible conclusion that I was a constructive blockhead. My suspicions were simply outrageous in their defect of evidence, and could never for one moment have seemed otherwise to any imagination less riotously ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... or showing any deference in his manner, answered with a scarcely veiled note of insolence in his voice: "Good-morning, Monsieur Peyrolles. You are not punctual. A defect. Sit down." ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... an excess of smoke gushed from it. After the captain's attention was called to it, it happened that a tree in front, but somewhat out of line, was cut off by a Federal shell just as our gun fired. Supposing the defect had caused a wild shot, we were ordered to take the gun to the rear, the other gun soon following. We got away at a fortunate time, as the Second Brigade of Jackson's division was flanked by the enemy and driven over the place a few minutes later. One company in the Twenty-first Virginia ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... ethical philosophy of Aristotle, a defect which at once strikes a modern in regard to his scheme of virtues is that benevolence is not recognised, except obscurely as a form of magnanimity; and that, in general, the gentler virtues, so prominent in Christianity, have little place in the list. The virtues ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... he soon had tried the bottom with his bayonet, and found a prize worth fishing for; and he came running into our room carrying the sausages, which owing to their oily state did not fail to leave a trace of their whereabouts. We soon repaired this defect so as not to be noticeable on the floor, which was not kept so clean as it might be, and which our stay there had not improved much, and then we had a fine meal off our sausages, which, to use Pig's own ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... me none that I could make use of, and yet I turned him inside out, like a glove. This banker is a remarkable man; you don't often meet with one of his sort nowadays. Evariste says he has not a single vice, not even a little defect by which his valet could gain ten sous. He neither smokes, drinks, nor plays; in fact, he is a saint. He is worth millions, and lives as respectably and quietly as a grocer. He is devoted to his wife, adores his children, is lavishly hospitable, and ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... has been fulfilled in many a school chapel. Those of us who have had to pass through the valley of sorrow and temptation and loneliness—and who has not?—know that this is no mean claim. Boys, even men, often grumble at what they really value. To do so is our national defect, misleading to the onlooker. The truth is, we are so fearful of being accused of casting our pearls before swine, that we often pretend, even to ourselves, that what we know to be the most precious pearl in our ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... to meet this defect of protection by adequate dispositions; and this he failed to do. Numerically his force was the same as Nelson's; but, while the latter had only seventy-fours, there were in the French fleet one ship ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... excitement it causes, the tarantella is a sitting-down dance. I'm too stupid with cards to take the risk of playing; even mamma does not advise it yet, though she wishes to have me coached. So I shall have some time to myself after all, for my defect puts me out of three Lenten card clubs to which mamma belongs, two of which meet at our house. That leaves only two sewing classes, three Lenten theatre clubs (one for lunch and matinee and two for dinner and the evening), and Mr. Bell's cake-walk ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... of the centers does not set in, can also be demonstrated by the results of later hypnotizations. I ask my hypnotized subject not to perceive the friend in the room; he is indeed unable to see him or to hear him. Yet his visual and acoustic centers are not impaired, the defect is only selective, inasmuch as he sees me, the hypnotizer, and not the friend. But even this selection inhibits only the attitude and not the sensorial excitement. If I hypnotize him again to-morrow and suggest to him now to remember all that the friend did and said during yesterday's ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relatives. For the same reason, they can never amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that can be a wisp of fog?" mused the young inventor. He rubbed his eyes, thinking it might be a swirling of the night mist or a defect of vision. Then, as he saw more plainly, he noticed the thing in white ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... Krantzius.] The inhabitants do celebrate the actes of their ancestours, and of their times, with songs, and they graue them in rocks and promontories, that they may not decay with posterity, but onely by the defect ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... other words, we can never see a 'necessary connection' between any two events. He collects passages from earlier writers to show how Hume had been anticipated; and holds that Bacon's inadequate view of this truth was a main defect in his theories.[177] Hence we have a characteristic conclusion. He says, when discussing the proofs of the existence of God,[178] that we have an 'irresistible conviction of the necessity of a cause' for every ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... in Regem, quoniam non sit similis illi in omni populo. Nature design'd your Majesty a King, Fortune makes others; nor are you more your peoples by birth, and a glorious series of Progenitors, then by your merits: This appeared in all those digits of your darkest Eclipse; The defect was ours, not your Majesties. For the Sun is alwaies shining, though men alwaies see him not; and since the too great splendor, and prosperity did confound us, it pleased God to interpose those clouds, till we should be better able to behold you with more reverence ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... Juliet Bingham, following her with astonished eyes. Then she turned to Langbourne. "It's perfectly ridiculous, and I don't see how I can ever explain it. I don't think Barbara has shown a great deal of tact," and Juliet Bingham was evidently prepared to make up the defect by a diplomacy which she enjoyed. "I don't know where to begin exactly; but you must certainly excuse my—manner, ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... such. The wrong comes, not from the object of our doing which is good, but from the intention which is bad. It is true that nothing is good that is not thoroughly good, that a thing is bad only when there is something lacking in its goodness, that evil is a defect of goodness; but formal evil alone can be imputed to us and material cannot. The one is a conscious, the other an unconscious, defect. Here an erroneous conscience is obeyed; there the same conscience is disregarded. And that kind of a conscience ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Amoret to sight? Or hast thou mist in any Magick rite; For want of which any defect in me, May make our ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... obtained: nay more, almost every provincial town, whether in this country or on the Continent, possesses better engraved and more accurate plans than this great capital can pretend to. Try and use your influence to get this defect supplied. ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... ideas, his thought and language—produced on the mind of the hearer the impression of a man who, in familiar phraseology, comes and goes, feels his way, tries everything, breaks off his gestures, and finishes nothing. This defect was purely superficial, and in contrast with the decisiveness of a firmly-set mouth, and the strongly-marked character of his physiognomy. His rather jerky gait matched his mode of speech. These peculiarities helped to affirm his supposed insanity. In spite ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... It holds fast to fundamentals, dispensing with most of the things of little practical use. It provides easy advances from the simple to the complicated. The field of number is explored in a great variety of directions so that pupils are made to feel at home in the subject. One large defect is the lack of printed exercise materials, the use of which would result in greatly increased effectiveness. Such printed materials ought to be ...
— What the Schools Teach and Might Teach • John Franklin Bobbitt
... therefore, at best define one sort of knowledge, the sort we call derivative, as opposed to intuitive knowledge. We may say: 'Derivative knowledge is what is validly deduced from premisses known intuitively'. In this statement there is no formal defect, but it leaves the definition of ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... decision, dictamen below deck, bajo cubierta on deck, sobre cubierta to declaim, declamar to declare, declarar decline, baja to decline, venir a menos to decree, decretar deeds, hechos deeds (law), actas defect, defecto to defer, diferir to define, definir definite, definitivo degree, grado, graduacion delay, demora to delay, demorar, postergar delegate, delegado to commit a delinquency, delinquir to deliver, entregar delivery, entrega to demand, ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... person in the world, or maybe several persons, whom you have greatly admired; still you did not love them perfectly; there was always some little thing about them in looks, manners, or disposition that could be rendered more pleasing; some defect or want you would like to see supplied; some fault or imperfection you would like to see corrected. Now suppose you had the power to take all the good qualities you found in the persons you loved and unite ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... literally translated from the MS which we follow; but there is evidently a defect or error in the text—probably arising from some mistake made by the first copyist, as the MS. is not the first original, but a copy made apparently by ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... when even avarice has ceased to please. As a matter of fact, Disraeli himself was neither avaricious nor revengeful, and, as far as one can judge, was never tempted to be either. This is the fatal defect of almost all Disraeli's aphorisms: they are dead words, whilst the words of a true aphorism have veins filled with the life of their utterer. Nothing of this sort ever escaped the lips of our modern Sphinx. If he had ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... one fatal defect in our Alaskan game law, in the perpetual and sweeping license to kill, that is bestowed upon "natives" and "prospectors." Under cover of this law, the Indians can slaughter game to any extent they choose; and they are great killers. For example: ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... once sightless but now seeing, departed, others came, bringing a dumb friend whose affliction seems to have been primarily due to the malignant influence of an evil spirit rather than to any organic defect. Jesus rebuked the wicked spirit—cast out the demon that had obsessed the afflicted one and held him in the tyranny of speechlessness. The man's tongue was loosened, he was freed from the evil incubus, and was ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... abdomen, seems in a state of inflammation, as when they are trying to remove a mortified human limb; and the poor fish, feeling its strength leaving it, true to instinct, goes to the entrance to the burn where it ought to have spawned, and, unable to ascend, dies. The defect is probably the want of the aid ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... which is very disagreeable. Debts are contracted, acquaintances begun about a green table end by quarrels in which life or honour comes to grief; and though one may be an honest man, one finds oneself ruined by very honest men, whose only defect is that they have not two hundred thousand ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... remedy this defect; and for this purpose they took several poles of an equal length, the one end of which they fastened to the side of the house, and let the other two ends meet in the middle, by which means they formed a roof exactly like that which we commonly see upon buildings; they also ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... Pindarick madness" is well known. The "first and obvious defect" of Dryden's Threnodia "is the irregularity of its metre." The "lax and lawless versification" of this type of poetry, he wrote in the Life of Cowley, "concealed the deficiencies of the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle." One ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... know," he went on more frankly, now that the first hesitation was over and he realized that if he were to gain anything at all by Kennedy's services, there must be the utmost candor between them, "you know cousins may marry if the stocks are known to be strong. But if there is a defect, it is almost sure to be intensified. And so I—I gave up the idea—never had it, in fact, so strongly as to propose to her. And when I met Eugenia all the Athertons on the family tree couldn't have ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... "Speller" was a work of less pretentions, perhaps, and yet it had an immense sale. Eight years ago this book had reached a sale of 40,000,000, and yet it had the same grave defect. It was disconnected, cold, prosy and dull. I read it for years, and at last became a close student of Mr. Webster's style, yet I never found but one thing in this book, for which there seems to have been such a perfect stampede, ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... carry weight as representing the impartial and judicial estimate of a careful observer desiring only accurately to picture Carlyle as he was. The only logical conclusion, it seems to me, was that Carlyle, in addition to ocular defect with its legitimate consequences, was weighed down by worry over the failure to realize his own exaggerated ideal of health, that he devoted an undue degree of attention to this subject and was unduly anxious about it—in other words, that he ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... to submit one thing more to the consideration of the visitors, which appears to me a matter of very great consequence, and the omission of which I think a principal defect in the method of education pursued in all the academies I have ever visited. The error I mean is, that the students never draw exactly from the living models which they have before them. It is not indeed their intention, nor are they directed to do ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... defect in Cromwell—a defect which he had in common with many others of his time—that he threw himself into a revolution having for its first object to remodel the civil government, animated only with the passions of the collateral controversy upon ecclesiastical government. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... son can recollect in the father's character, is a want of firmness in blaming when blame was due, and an incapacity of refusing a request or rejecting a proposal strongly urged by others. The latter defect was, in his son's judgment, the cause of the greatest disasters which he experienced as a man of business. Both defects were closely allied to virtues—extreme tenderness of heart and consideration for the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... laid it in the race. The mental development of the normal infant is indicated by the increasing accuracy and delicacy of muscular coordination. The feeble-minded child very early shows its mental defect in the clumsy use of its muscles. Because of the functional relation of the voluntary muscles and the mentality, physical training is in a large degree mental training. When by such training we give dexterity to muscles of the growing person we are making possible better mental development; ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... early Greece was regarded as the representative of Zeus: his duties could be satisfactorily discharged only by a man who was perfect, and without blemish, i.e., by a man in the prime of life, suffering from no defect of body, or mind; he quotes in illustration the speech of Odysseus (Od. 19. 109 ff.). "'Even as a king without blemish, who ruleth god-fearing over many mighty men, and maintaineth justice, while the black earth beareth wheat ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... rather of a repellent disposition. I wish there were more, and amongst them some of the best of people, similarly changed. Surely the latter would soon be, if once they had a glimpse of how much the coming of the kingdom is retarded by defect of courtesy. The people I mean are slow to like, and until they come to like, they seem to dislike. I have known such whose manner was fit to imply entire disapprobation of the very existence ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... him on an errand; for he could hardly make shift to saunter a mile in an hour, and when he arrived at the place of his destination, he usually forgot three fourths of his message, and endeavoured to supply the defect by some blundering tale of his own invention. He was once dispatched by his father, in great haste, to a gentleman who lived not a quarter of a mile off, to request the favour of his company, in half an hour's time, to settle matters with a grazer, of whom they had purchased ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... Apprentice, unless he be a perfect youth having no maim or defect that may render him uncapable of ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... in their stead the people throughout the country would be supplied with the Rochester Times, which would assure the farmers that cheap food tended to produce cheaper labour, and the land-owners that if they did not obtain high rents it was their own fault, the defect being in their own bad cultivation—and the more rapid the augmentation of the millers' fortunes, and of the extent of their pleasure-grounds, the greater, they would be assured, must be the prosperity of the whole people; even although ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... best of Mr. Schoolcraft's works, though its value is much impaired by the want of a literal rendering, and the introduction of decorations which savor more of a popular monthly magazine than of an Indian wigwam. Mrs. Eastman's interesting Legends of the Sioux (Dahcotah) is not free from the same defect. Other tales are scattered throughout the works of Mr. Schoolcraft and various modern writers. Some are to be found in the works of Lafitau and the other Jesuits. But few of the Iroquois legends have been printed, though a considerable ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... reading to bear easily upon the tenor of his musings, and knew how to use books as an aid to thinking, instead of letting them take the edge off thought. There was assuredly nothing of the compiler or the erudite collegian in him. It is a graver defect that he introduces the great names of literature without regard for true historical perspective in their place, either in relation to one another, or to the special phases of social change and shifting time. Still ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... in the crown worn by this figure is probably only apparent and not intentional; M. Foucart, after a careful examination of the fragment, concludes that it is due to subsequent damage or to an original defect in the stone; cf. Bulletin, ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... one cell of a battery has an internal short circuit, or some other defect which causes it to lose its charge, the cell will be discharged before the others which are in series with it, and when this cell is completely discharged, the other cells will send a current through it in a discharge direction, and the negative plates will have a coating ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... felt at home in jail. It was not a bad place of residence during the coldest months. But for one defect, jail life would have been quite enviable; it forced upon ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... were quashed on the ground of a defect in its substance, then the case falls. But this is only defective in form. Another grand jury can indict you again. Now if the District Attorney should be a little easy—and I think that, considering your age, and my influence with him, he would be—a new commitment might not issue perhaps before ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... eyebrows were arched a little over the earnest, unfathomable eyes; the lips were parted as if with impetuous breath; the whole head leaned slightly forward, giving prominence to the chin, which in reality retreated, a defect chiefly noticeable in profile. Ted had painted what he saw. It might have been the head of a saint looking for the Beatific Vision; it was only that of ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... sometimes a message from its living windows. Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by moments from eyes that are apt to express none but common things. There are allusions unawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief glances. Far from me and from my friends be the misfortune of meeting such looks in reply to pain of our inflicting. To be clever and sensitive ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... the latter to the unassuming rejected Rosinante of Sir Felix. A trifling delay, however, occurred; the stirrups of the Baronet's charger were too short, and he alighted while the groom repaired the defect. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... mechanical routine of their office, losing sight of the end in their exclusive devotion to what is only the means—teaching the THING, but failing to instruct the PERSON—eager to pour in knowledge, but neglecting to bring out mind.' Is there not indicated in these words a real and a very grave defect of the manner in which subjects are now presented, studied, recited, and finished up in our schools? We think there is. And then, what is the effect of this study and teaching, with so much less thought ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Of what? Of the acquittal? What does it matter to me? I don't care—on the contrary, I prefer it. I am certain the advocate won't ferret out some unintentional defect—some formality ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... for their audacious and delicious disregard of truth, and the Book of Jonah is "briny" from beginning to end. It contains only forty-eight verses, but its brevity is no defect. On the contrary, that is one of its greatest charms. The mind takes in the whole story at once, and enjoys it undiluted; as it were a goblet of the fine generous wine of romance. Varying the expression, ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... auditor was deaf. A slight defect in an auditor. Master Florian delivered judgment, none the less, without appeal and very suitably. It is certainly quite sufficient for a judge to have the air of listening; and the venerable auditor ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... conclusions, we should not long remain in ignorance with respect to the natural history of this earth, a subject on which hitherto opinion only, and not evidence, has decided: For in no subject, perhaps, is there naturally less defect of evidence, although philosophers, led by prejudice, or misguided by false theory, may have neglected to employ that light by which they should have seen the ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... I consider it a very great defect, and slight as this blemish appears in Miss Lovel, her money could never blind me to the fact if I knew ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... self-deprecation. She, no less than Olga Hannaford, credited Kite with wonderful artistic powers; in their view, only his constitutional defect of energy, his incorrigible dreaminess, stood between him and great achievement. The evidence in support of their faith was slight enough; a few sketches, a hint in crayon, or a wash in water-colour, were all he had to show; but Kite belonged to that strange ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... time, particularly by specialists, the clearer has it become that they lacked nearly all originality. Especially were they faulty in their observations; besides, they had a definite tendency to replace observation by theory, a fatal defect in medicine. The fine development of surgery that came at the end of the Arabian period of medicine in Europe could never have come from the Arabs themselves. Gurlt has brought this out particularly, but it will not be difficult to ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... Unless when talking to his father, everything in his manner, tone, conversation was free, unfettered by convention, fresh, if at times startling. This was his great charm, and at the same time his great defect, for it revealed his want of qualities no less than ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... of the first branches of the Greys, a noble family in England.... He doth not want sense; but by reason of a defect in his speech, wants elocution.—Swift. He looked and talked like a very weak man; but it was said ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... energy, workmen being employed, day and night in finishing the building and arranging the goods. The severest tests have been used to try the strength of the galleries, which sustained an immense weight without the least deflection. In rainy weather the roof leaks in places, a defect which it has been found almost impossible to remedy. Several changes have been made in the exhibition regulations, to which the American delegates in London take exceptions, and they have appointed a Committee to confer with the Commissioners ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... partial acquaintance), or by Wordsworth when the Lyrical Ballads are confusing all judgments, and he can pick out at sight 'She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways' as 'the best piece in it,' and can define precisely the defect of much of the book, in one of those incomparable letters of escape, to Manning: 'It is full of original thought, but it does not often make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims at simplicity of expression.' I choose these instances because the final ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... prevention is better than cure—piety from childhood is better than reformation in manhood. The judgment of the Apostle upon him "who neglects to provide for his own house," even in temporal matters, is well known; and must there not be a radical defect and wrong in any religious organization which loses the great majority of its own youth, and depends largely on infusions from without for the recruit of its numbers? Such an organization may do much good, and widely extend in many places for the time being, especially in a new and unsettled ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... Marcel, Bernard, Jacques, and Etienne set out along the broad highroad that winds like a handsome yellow riband through the fields and meadows. Now they are off. They start all abreast; it is the best way. Only there is one defect in the arrangement this time; Etienne is too ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... life in the duels, as I spake before, were hastened to hanging with their wounds bleeding. For the State found it had been neglected so long, as nothing could be thought cruelty which tended to the putting of it down. As for the second defect, pretended in our law, that it hath provided no remedy for lies and fillips, it may receive like answer. It would have been thought a madness amongst the ancient lawgivers to have set a punishment upon the lie given, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... rather pretty pink and white complexion, and aside from the defect of hairdressing might have been attractive. She possessed a thin and aquiline nose, however, the nostrils fairly quivering with ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... friend—and, like a friend, Point out your very worst defect—Nay, never Start at that word! But I must ask you why You keep your school ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... evening, hinting this defect, as delicately as I could, to my good host, and was somewhat surprised to find that he did not consider it a ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... the right idea of civilization? The process which has been going on ever since the world began seems to have a defect in it; strength, vital power, somehow escapes. When you've got a man thoroughly civilized you cannot do anything more with him. And it is worth reflection what we should do, what could we spend our energies on, and what would evoke them, we who are both civilized ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... at him as if he had fallen direct from heaven. All stand in awe, no one talks, everyone is silent, every word is listened to when he speaks. It is a pity that he keeps people in suspense so long, for he has a defect of speech which compels him to speak very slowly and pause after every six words. Otherwise his is, as we all know, an admirable brain. His face is very ugly, pockmarked, and his nose rather long. He is ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of this spray of azalea beside me, what a wonder would it seem!—and yet one ought to be able, by the mere use of language, to supply to every reader the total of that white, honeyed, trailing sweetness, which summer insects haunt and the Spirit of the Universe loves. The defect is not in language, but in men. There is no conceivable beauty of blossom so beautiful as words,—none so graceful, none so perfumed. It is possible to dream of combinations of syllables so delicious that all the dawning and decay of summer cannot rival their perfections, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... is that it has no passions. "O noble privilege of age! if indeed it takes from us that which is in youth our greatest defect." But the higher feelings of our nature are not necessarily weakened; or rather, they may become all the brighter, being purified from the grosser ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... result was almost a case of life and death with me. The Sylvania had been built after the Islander, and her constructor had an opportunity to improve on her model. Our engine was a little more powerful than that of the other yacht, and a defect in the lines of the latter had been corrected in building ours. But the fact of our superior speed had been several times demonstrated by actual trial, and the improvements in our model and machinery only explained what had been proved. It was of course ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... 'swinging saloon' fitted into the vessel, with the ingenious hydraulic leverage by which it could be kept nicely balanced. But it was to be noted that the saloon was braced firmly to the sides of its containing vessel; in fact, it was given out that, owing to some defect in its mechanism, the thing could not be worked that day. Nothing could be handsomer than this saloon, with its fittings and decorations. But, strange to say, it was at once seen that the principle was faulty, and the whole impracticable. It was obvious that the centre of gravity of so enormous ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... hay-crops green and gladden the thirsty turf throughout the heat and drought of summer. The soil is a Jurassic limestone: the rain penetrates the porous rock, and sinks through cracks and fissures, to reappear above the base of the mountain in a full-grown stream. This is a defect in the Generoso, as much to be regretted as the want of shade upon its higher pastures. Here, as elsewhere in Piedmont, the forests are cut for charcoal; the beech-scrub, which covers large tracts of the hills, never ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... depends on the intention of the agent," and "that unfitness, misuse, abuse, is none the less wrong because the result of ignorance." Both these propositions are true. The same act may be in intent right and good, and yet, through defect of knowledge, wrong and evil; and it may, in virtue of its good intent, be attended and followed by beneficent results, while at the same time the evil that there is in it may be attended or followed ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... which was quickly gained, as his own. Though it was now in the deepest darkness, he gazed up at the high, narrow building, with the pointed arches of the windows and the bracket which supported the image of St. Cecilia carved from sandstone, as intently as if he could distinguish every defect in the windows, every ornament carved in the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... their other graces. Or you can shove back against the windows and let your feet stick out straight toward the infinite. It isn't the fault of a railway corporation or the master mechanic of a car factory if they don't reach the floor. It is a defect for which nature is responsible. President Lincoln once said every man's legs ought to be long enough to reach ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... that poems are extant, written upon more humble subjects, and in a still more naked and simple style, which have continued to give pleasure from generation to generation. Now, if nakedness and simplicity be a defect, the fact here mentioned affords a strong presumption that poems somewhat less naked and simple are capable of affording pleasure at the present day; and, what I wish chiefly to attempt, at present, was to justify myself for having written under the impression ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... by the Assembly and encouraged by a judicious actor who met him moping about the Peiraeus. He certainly seems to have been the reverse of athletic (the stalwart Aeschines upbraids him with never having been a sportsman), and he probably had some sort of defect or impediment in his speech as a boy. Perhaps the most interesting fact about his work for the law courts is that he seems to have continued it, in some measure, through the most exciting parts of his ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... The fatal defect in the new King was the absence of executive ability. Following the example of Henry (S135), he issued two charters or pledges of good government; but without power to carry them out, they proved simply ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery |
